“Not gettin’ wet, are you?” said Dolly.
“Not a scrap,” she answered. “This cloak keeps every drop out. Dolly, isn’t it first-rate to feel it pelting like this?”
“That last burst was a caution,” said Dolly, peering ahead. “Must have fallen solid points in the few minutes.”
“Yes,” said Ess, hesitatingly. “How many points do you think it would have made?”
Dolly looked at her, and then he threw his head back and yelled with laughter. “You’ve clean bowled me,” he declared. “I say, Miss Ess, you’ll think me an awful new-chum, but I’ve a confession to make. I don’t know what a point of rain means. There, now, it’s out. D’you know, ever since I came out here I’ve heard people talk casually of so many inches of rain and so many points in a year—everyone here will tell you there were twelve points fell here last year, and how many points a year for generations back—and seeing that everyone knew so much about it, and took it for granted I did, I never liked to own up I’d never heard of a point of rain till I came here. Now please tell me just how much it is.”
Ess smiled and looked at him, and smiled again, and then burst into a peal of laughter. Dolly pretended to be highly offended, and grumbling, said something about never making confessions to her again. But when this only sent Ess off into fresh peals, he looked hard at her again and began to chuckle. “Don’t—don’t say you don’t know,” he gurgled. She shook her head, still laughing, and Dolly yelled with laughter and stamped on the floor of the buggy, and held his sides and yelled again.
“I never did know,” gasped Ess at last. “All my life I’ve heard people discussing the ’points,’ and I’ve read the papers every rainy season about ‘Magnificent rains at Oodnadatta. Nine points registered,’ and that sort of thing. And I never knew and never dared to ask.” They drove on gaily, chuckling, and laughing, and joking, and poking fun at each other about the points of rain. They were like two children out on a holiday, and even when they found the gate standing in an inch of water, and trotted splashing for half a mile before they cleared it, never thought of danger. It was only when they reached another stretch of water, running wide and strong back towards the river, that they fell suddenly grave, and Ess said in some alarm, “Dolly, is it all right? We—we can get through, can’t we?”
“Why, of course,” said Dolly, cheerfully, although his heart had jumped at the look of that water and the width of it. “If we can’t make it here, we can higher up. Gerrup there,” and he drove the horses into the flood.
They splashed along for nearly a mile with the water little more than over the horses’ fetlocks, and Dolly made jesting remarks about a five-mile drive through a duck pond, and tried to make light of the thing. But when the water deepened rapidly and the horses sank to the knees, and then the girths, he began to feel really alarmed, especially as the sheet of water stretched for miles ahead, and the current was beginning to run stronger every few yards they advanced.
“This isn’t good enough,” he declared at last. “I don’t know how far this deep water runs, and it’s too far to chance swimming the horses if it’s all the way to the other side. We’ll have a shot at it higher up again.”